Word: jasper
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Primal myth now intertwines with a modern one, that of the New South. In Jasper, which is 55% white and 45% black, the New South is embodied in a black mayor and a white sheriff, both of whom came swiftly forward to declare the attack an isolated, containable hate crime. "We have no Aryan Nation or K.K.K. in Jasper County," said Sheriff Billy Rowles. Mayor R.C. Horn reinforced the notion: "We don't show any animosity here. This town has been about loving each other. If it was different, I wouldn't be mayor." Residents of Jasper...
...some citizens were not persuaded by the protestations of harmony. "How deep does this river run?" asked Herman Wright, an African American and the manager of a local sawmill. The remarks by Sheriff Rowles were greeted with hoots. In Jasper, people still wonder about the suicide a few years back of a popular black high school football player who dated a white girl. People ask, though without evidence, Did he really hang himself, or was he lynched? And just two weeks ago, a white youth was beaten up by black teens...
Everyone knows everyone else in Jasper. Byrd may have been invited to hitch a ride by one suspect, the truck's owner, Shawn Allen Berry, 23, with whom he shared a parole officer. (Byrd had served time for theft and forgery, Berry for burglary.) The Byrd and King families have been in Jasper for generations. A member of Byrd's extended family had worked as a babysitter for a relative of King's. And yet, if what Berry told police is accurate, his friend King was openly hostile to Byrd and, while beating him, allegedly said he was "starting...
...Kimler, a local attorney. "These are three guys who got mean, got drunk and saw an easy target." But a target for what kind of anger? History lies in wait in the woods that stretch 100 miles through East Texas to Louisiana, biding its time to strike. Towns like Jasper were the refuge for Confederate deserters who fled to the forests after the Civil War. The area became fertile ground for the Klan. "There is a predisposition, a culture over here in East Texas," says John Craig, co-author of Soldiers of God, a new book about America's white...
More worrisome is the fact that Christian Identity churches have begun springing up around Jasper, including one in nearby Burkeville. The ideology, which preaches that white people are the true Israelites, has moved in subtly. "They look for small autonomous country churches with no debt and a bank account," says Craig. "They fire the pastor, they get tax status and what looks like the Shady Grove Baptist Church; well, they are singing Amazing Grace and then saying Sieg Heil." Killing in the name of religious and racial purity is within the moral contract of Christian Identity, say experts. Authorities last...